The present teachings relate generally to method and apparatus for the operator, device, and platform-independent collection, and cross-platform translation, and distribution of user activity catalogs.
The advent of the Internet, network-enabled cellular telephones, and other networked devices has spawned a new era of advertising and content delivery. One factor spurring the increase in online advertising and other content delivery is the potential for targeted marketing to cell phone, Internet, and other users. Search-based advertising, for instance, has proliferated, in which content related to a user's search topic is automatically inserted in selectable banner ads or other advertising media.
Despite the widespread adoption of cellular and Internet advertising and other media, certain barriers to the effectiveness of networked content delivery remain. One factor is that consumers do not tend to give as much consideration to network-generated advertising content as they do to the recommendations or experiences of their immediate friends and other acquaintances. Traditional advertising platforms and channels generally fail, however, to exploit the marketing power of peer-reported recommendations and experiences.
Cellular and Internet providers and operators around the world, for example, offer services and devices that support the browsing, purchase, and download of games, ringtones, wallpapers, screensavers, music, and other types of DRM-protected services or content. DRM-protected content is generally purchased through a shopping catalog that is managed by the operator and made available to the user via either the mobile or the operator's website. The catalog tries to differentiate and promote some pieces of content over others, generally without regard to the user's preference, but rather based on the operator's partnerships with content developers. Commercial catalogs themselves do not, however, provide the credibility and personal connection that the user is most easily able to relate to, and in general those catalogs are not tailored by user preferences and/or preferences and experiences of the user's social group. Those accumulated experiences can therefore remain hidden from mutual members of the group. Although inference based-catalogs and user recommendations have begun to be supported, the catalogs are still operator-controlled, the one-off recommendations tend to not be sufficient to cause a significant revenue impact, and the catalogs themselves do not provide the credibility or personality to which the user is able to relate easily.
It may be desirable to provide platforms and techniques that harness the leveraging effect of allowing users to accumulate and freely share their experiences and recommendations to other network users and that allow operators, merchants, and others to monetize those compounded content feeds. It may be further desirable to provide an ability to generate and distribute those feeds to various group members on a context-sensitive and/or device-independent basis, since in certain regards, the membership group can have a set of diverse handsets and other devices.